Wednesday, November 30, 2011

Yaaaay!

Wednesday is my day for volunteering at St. Elizabeth's. I like St. E's--the atmosphere, the location, the Christian worldview (even if they are Catholic) but I'm a little frustrated. I'm volunteering up in the postnatal ward, and the nurses aren't busy enough to delegate much to volunteers. Finding enough to do is a bit difficult, because I can't take my supervisor's advice and knock on doors, asking patients if they need anything. This is, apparently, the nurses' territory. They have a point--a new mother probably isn't interested in doing much beyond sleeping and cooing at her baby, and who am I to interrupt? But that leaves such activites as making tea-pads and badgering Mallory at the desk for chores to do.

Well, today I did very little badgering. The tea-pad supply was actually low, and I spent an hour and a half making tea-pads. While no task can be entirely mindless, one does eventually hit the limit on refinements to technique. I think I am approaching this point, making tea-pads. I mean, I've got my work setup down. Now I'm trying to order my operations to maximize cooling of the tea before I have to hold a thin plastic bottle full of it. Divide and Conquer sounds fun, but the fun is limited. Anyway. The supply of tea-soaked maxipad icepacks is now Topped Up.

After that I did go and ask Mallory, just in case, because while the supply of care packs is low, I can't make up more without more photocopies of the booklet, which always runs out before I come. Mallory told me that the lady at the Labor and Delivery desk had mentioned a project for a volunteer. That was interesting! I mean, it was filing, and I probably committed a dozen HIPAA violations today, just trying to find a clear version of a patient's name in order to look for her file, but admissions and things were going on in the background, and medical eavesdropping can be educational--especially if one asks questions afterwards. Medical questions, not gossipy ones, of course.

To summarize--today I felt both competent and useful. Best of all, I felt as though I was learning.

Friday, November 25, 2011

Literary devices

Sometimes, after an epic, life-changing adventure, a character forgets everything at the end. Patricia McKillip used this in Ombria in Shadow; the city shifted, and nobody could remember that things had ever been different. Robin McKinley explains in a blog post why this is a horrible thing to do to one's characters: adventures are for learning about oneself, and how can the changes in a character remain when the character has forgotten what she can do? I thought it just bothered me because I hate forgetting, but okay. Erasure of character development.

However, even though this device is Not Okay, writers still use it. I understand why, of course. Sometimes the author wants to release a character back into the wild after a long and disturbing period in situations that ought not to exist, and the only clear way for the character to return to normal life as if nothing had happened is for him to forget all about those adventures. Artemis Fowl was mindwiped by the fairies because, if I recall correctly, they didn't want him complicating things anymore, and I think he went along with it. Of course, since he'd become Chaotic Good only through the long process of Adventures, as soon as they erased his memories he went back to being evil, though perhaps with a nagging feeling that he shouldn't be doing this stuff.

My question is not, "But why would anyone ever want to do that?" My question is, "Does anyone actually like this device?" Is there a single reader out there who reads something like Artemis Fowl and says, "Oh, yeah, they erased all his fun memories of adventures and making friends and becoming a decent person! I love it when they do that! I hope he never remembers!" I would understand some enjoyment if the reader was looking forward to the process by which, in spite of everything, the character remembers after all. I would understand some pleasant anticipation of Artemis's sneaky recording of a video to himself, explaining everything he's forgotten. Sometimes shoujo mangaka like to use temporary amnesia as a device for demonstrating that circumstances don't matter, and the hero will fall in love with the heroine all over again even without the help of whatever weird situation the writer used to bring them together in the first place. These tend to irritate me a bit, but I could understand someone enjoying them. But--at the end of the story--no sequel in sight--for everyone to forget? Completely? It's so unfair to the characters! Readers remember their adventures, but characters aren't allowed to read the book themselves......

Tuesday, November 22, 2011

Ponies

As a horse-mad child, I scorned My Little Pony. I liked my toy horses to have some verisimilitude, and purple ponies with long pink manes had nothing to do with the animals I adored. For me, there were no pink ponies, only strawberry roans. Commercials for the toys annoyed me, and I never discovered the TV series.

Now I am less horse-mad, and three of my four brothers watch My Little Pony. In my defense, it's not quite the same as the MLP I despised. The theme song has changed, and the ponies are even less realistic. I still twitch occasionally, I admit. The characters are just a little too dextrous with those hooves, and some of the poses bother me a bit. For the most part, though, I can relax and enjoy it. It's become so unrealistic that I can dismiss most standards of reality while watching it, doing my best to suspend all disbelief while Pinkie Pie and Apple Blossom make cupcakes, or Rainbow Dash herds clouds to shape the weather.

Friday, November 18, 2011

I finally finished the first draft of the second paper for Sociology! It's due Monday, but I needed to have a draft early enough to get it to Smarthinking and back. Initial objective: completed! I'd like to do well, but I'm not sure my interpretation of the requirements is in compliance with Mr. Packard's intentions, so we'll see. I'd like to do well on this; most of my quizzes have been 100%, while my previous paper was 98% and my midterm exam score was perfect. Mr. Packard wrote on the score sheet that I'm the second student in his nineteen years teaching this class to get a perfect score on that exam. That's when he started putting smilies on my grades.

I was telling Christine about it--she's been doing a paper for Psych, but she's got a lot going on, so her grades are suffering. This means she's getting A-minuses instead of A-pluses. Christine has high standards, so we've been getting along well. She was telling me about her experience with Soci, earlier this year--she did pretty well, but the paper I'm working on now is one she had a bad grade on, and in comparing that grade with the others she had in the class, she happened to mention that her midterm score was 103. "Was Mr. Packard your teacher?" I asked. Yes--in other words, if it wasn't for Christine, I could've been the first student ever to have a perfect midterm score! While I'm wishing for nice round numbers.....if I'd waited a year, I could've been the first student in twenty years......

Friday, November 11, 2011

No more barn

On Saturday I sold the ewes. I'm going to school full-time this winter, and I won't be able to supervise lambing the way I usually do. Originally, I hoped to time lambing for spring, but the fences weren't up in time to separate the ram, and he had his way, as usual. So they had to go.

Two of the ewe lambs have been gone about a month. Nora and Zora went to a happy home near Lincoln with an enthusiastic lady interested in handspinning and knitting their wool. She sent me some photos; they're much tamer now, and she's been brushing the burrs out of their wool. I'm entirely satisfied about them.

I had more trouble selling the others, though. Three different buyers vanished on me, responding to a couple of emails--even coming to see the sheep, in one case--before vanishing into thin air. I adjusted my prices. Then I readjusted them. No good.

Finally, last Thursday, someone emailed me asking if I was selling "sheeps," and for how much. I phoned the number in the email on Friday. The guy was Muslim, and any animals I sold him would clearly be slaughtered, but I expected that for Felix, and Letta had hurt herself trying to jump a fence. Slaughter might be the best I could hope for, if she sold at all. We set up a time on Saturday for Dana and his dad to come see my sheep.

The crowd that arrived on Saturday was not "Dana and his dad." Dana was there, yes, and so was another college-age guy, two middle-aged men, and a teenager named Muhammed. Felix and Letta were not going to satisfy this crowd. We all went out to the barn, with Doug following along to satisfy Dad's paranoia.

The bargaining process was long and complicated. One of the old men wanted Felix, while Dana and his dad were interested in Hina and Lizzie. Prices bounced back and forth, giving me my first taste of serious bargaining. To complicate matters, Bashir explained to me that the sheep were for a "donation," a charitable feast for which the animals were required to be staggered a year apart in age. Felix was six months old; Hina and Letta were two-year-olds; and Lizzie was somewhere near seven. Dana translated questions and offers, arguing in long volleys of foreign syllables, Arabic or Farsee or who knows what. I am not a scholar of Arabic.

Arrangements morphed swiftly. First they were taking two sheep; then they were taking three, but leaving one until Monday. Then they were going to put Hina and Felix in the SUV, and Lizzie in the trunk of the sedan. However, even hog-tied they wouldn't all fit, so they had to cut Felix's throat before they loaded him. Then they offered fifty for Letta, while they were at it. I fought them up to seventy, but her throat had to be cut, too.

Then one of the old men noticed the chickens. Would we sell chickens? Mom was willing to sell chickens. I started catching chickens. Another? I made Dana and Muhammed help me catch chickens. "We're buying all Anna's animals!" Dana joked.

They did, too. Almost. Oak is still here, wandering forlornly through the pasture. I watched him closely while we tied his ewes, wondering if he would fight, and he wondered, too, but he never did. His harim was kidnapped and slaughtered, and now he's alone, waiting to be sold.